One of the positives of aging is living an unhurried life with ample down time, offering opportunities for reflection. These moments have led me to conceive of aging in a spiritual context, giving my life new meaning. What do I mean by spiritual aging? It’s reframing ordinary moments as sacred, casting a gratitude perspective on relationships [...]
Pat Taub
This past weekend I traveled from my home in Portland, Maine to Oneonta, New York to attend the 90th birthday party of a dear friend I have known for 50 years. I wasn’t prepared for the time travel my visit set off. I kept bouncing around from the present to the past to the future and back again. I met Dave, the birthday celebrant, when [...]
Pat Taub
Almost two years into Israel’s genocide in Gaza, 60,000 have died, not counting all those buried under the rubble. Among the causalities: 1,000 men, women and children gunned down while racing to grab meager boxes of food, along with the deliberate murders of 1,000 doctors and nurses and 232 journalists. Now things have cruelly escalated. [...]
Pat Taub
Practically everyone I know is feeling overwhelmed by Herr Donald’s rapid-fire attacks on all we hold dear, which includes police state tactics in arresting migrants, gutting federal funds for housing, daycare, medical benefits, and public schools, while supplying bombs nonstop to perpetuate the live-streamed genocide in Gaza. In general [...]
Pat Taub
In our increasingly unsettled times, I treasure my close female friends who offer support and solace for navigating the road ahead. When I told a friend I was blogging about women’s friendships, she good-naturedly commented, “If grown women had pajama parties, they wouldn’t need therapists.” She was referring to the close connections [...]
Pat Taub
I have a friend who’s been telling me for years that she’s going to take Italian lessons. Another friend has a long-standing dream to visit Japan. For just as long, every time I pass an art supply store, I revisit my dream of taking up watercolors. We’re members of the late-in-life dream club whose engine is stalled. But it doesn’t [...]
Pat Taub
GUEST POST by JANET WEIL After pouring out my heart to a dear friend about my anguish over the Gaza Genocide, I asked her, “What are you thinking and feeling about all this?” “I feel exhausted,” was her honest, sad reply. “I get it,” I told her. We all only have so much capacity for family, friends, community, and political activism. [...]
Pat Taub
Molly Jong-Fast’s new memoir, “How to Lose Your Mother” conjured up memories of the 1981 film, “Mommie Dearest,” where Faye Dunaway played Joan Crawford, Hollywood’s narcissistic abusive mother. Jong-Fast is writing about her famous mother Erica Jong, author of “Fear of Flying. Jong, while narcissistic was not physically abusive, [...]
Pat Taub
When I think about what has made my life meaningful, it’s come from those experiences where I woke up. Events that rocked my world when I was confronted with truths that ran counter to how I was living my life. As a young woman I was awakened as a result of living through the Viet Nam war and the second wave of Feminism. As the Viet [...]
Pat Taub
GUEST POST by LISA SAVAGE Yesterday I read a novel that took me back to the fierce experience of becoming a mother under late-stage capitalism. Claire Kilroy perfectly captures the despair and precarious state of infant mothers where there is no mothering for them. The protagonist of SOLDIER SAILOR is at the end of her rope and very nearly [...]
Pat Taub